20,000 Out-of-Towners Fill Madison Square Garden for Trump

When I told people I was planning to attend Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden yesterday afternoon, they all expressed worries about my safety. “You’re going to the Nazi rally? Be careful!” Somewhere in my bookshelves I have a dusty copy of Under Cover, the Armenian American journalist Arthur Derounian’s account of his travels among the German-American Bund and other homegrown fascist groups in the 1930s and ’40s. Famously, back in February 1939 the Bund held a big rally at the old Madison Square Garden—hence my friends’ concerns that I was putting myself in harm’s way.

Having attended dozens of Trump’s rallies since 2015, I’ve never once felt in any physical danger. It’s true that in 2016 some protesters were roughed up by the crowd—to the candidate’s evident approval. At times the staging of his events seems right out of the Leni Riefenstahl playbook—lots of motorcycle cops in shiny leather boots escorting the candidate’s limo, with big vertical banners flanking the stage. And reporters in the press pen often come in for verbal abuse by the candidate, an indignity I generally avoid by sitting up in the bleachers among the believers. (On Sunday, he goaded the Garden crowd into booing the “fake news.”) But the only injuries I’ve ever suffered on such occasions have been emotional—the ordeal of having to listen to so many lies, repeated so often, and with such apparent conviction.

Besides, after nine years I’ve grown numb to Trump’s mendacity. As for the Nazi menace, the first thing I saw turning the corner onto 33rd Street was a pack of young Yeshiva bochers with long payess curled under their red MAGA caps watching the warm-up acts livestreamed onto their cell phones. This was a much less diverse crowd than showed up for Trump’s rally in Crotona Park in May—and also a less confident one. Back in the spring, with a Biden-Trump rematch in the offing and victory for their man seemingly preordained, the atmosphere was carnivalesque. At the Republican convention, the delegates were even more notably good-humored. All that ended, though, when Biden withdrew in favor of Kamala Harris.

What took its place? Outside the Garden, a kind of sullen impatience, enlivened only a little by the free T-shirts handed out by Kalshi, the political betting site whose operations were just sanctioned by a federal appeals court last week. (The shirts, urging punters to “Bet on Trump” quoted him at 57 percent odds—though by the time the rally ended, that had risen to 62 percent.) Penned in by police barricades, it took us nearly three hours to trudge from 6th Avenue down toward the entrance to the arena on 7th. With Trump scheduled to begin speaking at 5, people began to leave—an exodus encouraged by the lack of any toilet facilities, and the proximity of the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit terminals at Penn Station. Finally, the police announced that the Garden was full, and that no one else would be admitted. At which point, my strategy of blending in with the crowd began to seem like a mistake, and I asked for directions to the press entrance, only to find that it, too, had been closed down.

So I, too, went home (to Brooklyn), where I turned on the TV in time to catch Vivek Ramaswamy describe New York as a “swing state.” That’s a bet I would happily take. But then if you’d told me in 2020 that Tulsi Gabbard would be speaking at a Trump rally, describing the man who urged the US to let Bibi Netanyahu “finish the job” in Gaza as the peace candidate, I wouldn’t have believed that either. And if you’d offered me a trifecta of Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Trump on the same podium I’d probably have taken that bet, too.

Yet there he was, America’s favorite amateur taxidermist, peddling his patent blend of paranoia and preposterous bullshit (dipped in Kennedy charisma and served with a sprinkling of radical rage), looking only a little less out of place than Dr. Phil, who delivered a touching homily on the need to stand up to bullies. Was Elon Musk listening? Was anyone? The audience seemed mostly baffled, and though they dutifully clapped at Kennedy’s attacks on the medical establishment, big business, and the CIA, you could tell (even if Kennedy clearly can’t) that their hearts weren’t in it.

Which is something no one can say about Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald—the Wall Street firm that lost 658 employees on 9/11—and the chair of Trump’s transition team. Bounding to the podium shouting, “We must elect Donald J. Trump because we must crush jihad!” (which must have come as a shock to the Trump faithful in Hamtramck), Lutnick then embarked on a long reverie outlining his version of Making America Great, which involved doing away entirely with income tax. In a less target-rich media environment, Lutnick’s whole speech—which included anti-Muslim hatred, making the world safe for Wall Street billionaires to hoard their wealth, and the kind of blatant self-dealing that has apparently even repelled some Trumpworld insiders—would have received the scrutiny it deserved. Instead, he functioned mainly as Elon Musk’s second banana, a bearded Pepper Potts to Musk’s smirking Tony Stark.

Having missed the obscure comedians and radio talk show hosts whose racist warm-ups made the headlines, I had to console myself with Musk, Hulk Hogan, and the Trump family love-in (which, bizarrely, was being broadcast live in its entirety on PBS). As usual at such events, the level of casual bigotry was high enough to deter the fainthearted. But then the ability to believe “they’re not talking about me” has always been the price of admission for people of color at Trump events. Standing on line behind the Hasidim, I overheard a man with an English accent and white nationalist tattoos explain to his companion—a young Pakistani man whose red cap proclaimed “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go”—how unfairly the press treat Tommy Robinson, whose anti-Muslim rhetoric helped set off days of deadly rioting this summer in Britain.

Whether Trump gets the chance to show he really “means it” when he says he wants to round up millions of immigrants, jail his political opponents, replace Social Security with private accounts (managed, perhaps, by his friends at Cantor Fitzgerald), and turn the military on domestic dissenters is a matter that may be settled in just over a week. For all our sakes, I hope we never find out.